China must make clear its intentions to keep engaging with the US, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, as the world’s biggest economies struggle to move past a spat over the shooting down of an alleged Chinese spy balloon in February.
(Bloomberg) — China must make clear its intentions to keep engaging with the US, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, as the world’s biggest economies struggle to move past a spat over the shooting down of an alleged Chinese spy balloon in February.
“Countries around the world expect us to manage the relationship with China responsibly,” Blinken told reporters on Tuesday at the close of the Group of Seven foreign ministers’ meeting at a mountain resort northwest of Tokyo. “And that starts with engagement, with having lines of communication.”
“My expectation would be that we will be able to move forward on that, but it does require China to make clear its own intentions in doing that,” Blinken added. “We’ll have to see if they do so. But if they do so, my expectation would be that we will find ways to engage as the presidents agreed during their Bali meeting.”
The spy balloon incident scuttled a tentative rapprochement following President Joe Biden’s meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping late last year on the Indonesian resort island of Bali, and prompted Blinken to cancel a long-planned trip to Beijing.
China has stonewalled US efforts to resume engagement, with two months already gone by after Biden said he expected to speak with Xi about the incident. In the meantime, Xi has visited Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow and hosted a range of leaders in Beijing, including France’s Emmanuel Macron and Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
While in Beijing, Lula told journalists that “it is important that the US stops encouraging war and starts talking about peace.” His country’s foreign minister, speaking in Brazil, also criticized Western sanctions against Russia.
Blinken on Tuesday declined to address Lula’s criticism, saying only that Brazil’s leader had a good meeting with Biden when they met in February. He also pointed to “remarkable convergence” on China between members of the G-7, and the group’s broader efforts to appeal to emerging economies in the so-called Global South with concrete action on food security, infrastructure investments and climate change.
G-7 nations are focused on “making it clear to countries around the world that this is not about asking or making them choose,” Blinken said. “It’s about offering a good indeed a better a better choice.”
China Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin blamed the deterioration in ties on the US “implementing a misconceived China policy based on misguided perceptions.”
“The US needs to stop interfering in China’s internal affairs, stop harming China’s interests and stop eroding the political foundation of bilateral ties while stressing the need to put up guardrails,” he said at a regular press briefing in Beijing.
(Updates with comment from China’s Foreign Ministry.)
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